Quotes About Citizens

Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.

First and foremost, the United States did not ratify the 1998 Rome Statute that founded the ICC. Successive administrations have stood by that decision and, as a result, American citizens are not subject to ICC jurisdiction.

I think president after president has always stood behind Israel. We always will. They're our ally there. And we have to do whatever we can help them to protect their citizens.

We need to protect the privacy rights of all Americans, and that means stopping the federal government from spying on the cellphones and emails of law-abiding citizens.

I'm advocating that American citizens interested in democracy should stay out of chain stores.

The more profit we make, the more stores we can open, the more donations we can make to our community, the more responsible citizens we can be for the environment. It's all interactive. It's all connected together. There's no separation.

What the French want is coherence, stability and justice. If I am in a favorable position today, it's because my fellow citizens want to make the effort to straighten out the country, and at the same time they want it to be just and equitable.

We need strategic strength for our industry, technology and innovation, a sense of security for our European citizens and common foreign and security capabilities to defend our interests.

Accordingly, it is our task to ensure that the Government formulates policies that foster the continued development of the IT sector while also providing for citizens' access to technology and opportunity for economic advancement.

A variety of national and international studies indicate that the broad-based deployment of information technology can have a substantial impact on our nation's economic productivity and growth as well as the educational and social success of our citizens.

it is the duty of the Government, through its servants, to protect the lives and property of the citizens, especially the innocent, unoffending citizens.

at the end of 1922, nearly one in four residents had taken an oath to a cryptic organization dedicated to the dehumanization of fellow citizens. A majority would soon elect a Klansman as their mayor.

In a democracy it is ultimately for us, the citizens, to judge where to place the balance between security and privacy, safety and liberty. It's our lives and liberties that are threatened, not only by terrorism but also by massive depredations of our privacy in the name of counter-terrorism. If those companies from which governments actually take most of our intimate details want to show that they are still on the side of the angels, they had better join this struggle for transparency too.

If political leaders choose which rights to give citizens, then there must be a caste of leaders who enjoy greater freedom than do the citizens who are the recipients of these "rights." That is, the rulers must stand on a higher plane from which they can hand down judgments about what rights are to be given to or withheld from the people below.

To hurt in any degree the interest of any one order of citizens, for no other purpose but to promote that of some other, is evidently contrary to that justice and equality of treatment which the sovereign owes to all the different orders of his subjects."40 Changes

The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more free speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.

In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.

To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.

Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.

Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen. We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted.

The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We

that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

a man can be human only under human conditions." The purpose of the state is to preserve these conditions, so that its citizens need not see personal survival as their only goal.

All citizens do have a measure of control, at least in democracies where their votes are counted, of how they belong to their nations. Perhaps they will have more confidence in unconventional choices if they see that each nation's founders were disobedient and unpredictable, men and women of imagination and ambition. The steel of every national monument was once molten.